‘Good Grief’ Review: An Aimless Exploration of Grief

To build a space for queer people like myself, every Saturday I’ll be posting interviews, opinion pieces (like this Good Grief review), listicles, reviews, and more focused on the LGBT community from a Latina perspective. Welcome to Queerly Not Straight!

Enjoy and leave a comment below if you have a suggestion for what I should cover next. P.S. I, Lyra Hale, do not give any site permission to copy or repost my work in any form. If you are reading this on any site besides Fangirlish, it has been stolen.

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Good Grief was the one movie of 2024 that I really wanted to like. As a queer person I was so excited to see someone like Dan Levy go from Schitt’s Creek to small projects here and there. And now he has finally directed and written a movie. The problem is, Good Grief is aimless, disjointed, and consists of a group of friends you end up having no sympathy for because even though they’re grieving, they spend more time telling you about grief instead of showing you through the actual movie. And I’ve been grappling with myself for days because I feel guilty for not liking this movie as a queer person. But it just wasn’t landing and we need to talk about why.

This movie taught me nothing about grief. Marc, for example, he found out that his husband had broken the terms of their open relationship and was going to explore a relationship with someone else. This happened on the night he died. And we never saw Marc process that grief. The only way that I can explain Marc’s journey in Good Grief is to imagine a pot of water that is just simmering. That’s what he was. I was waiting for him to boil over and for the movie to reach a pinnacle where everything turns on its head and he understands that even though his husband is a bag of dicks, he still loved him and that grief was complex. That never happened. He never boiled over. He just simmered. 

Days later after watching it, I still don’t know if Marc learned anything about grief. He never expressed any anger towards what his husband did to him. The only thing that he did was kiss a cute Frenchman, bring down a young artist expressing themselves when he couldn’t, talk about his mom for 2 seconds before that plot point disappears completely, and return a gift that was meant for his husband’s new partner. Or possible partner. Everything that Marc did in this movie led to him doing nothing when it came to his grief. And by the end of it when he’s walking towards his house and he sees the ghost of his husband standing on the porch, I couldn’t help wanting to pull my hair out in frustration. He didn’t do anything with his grief or process what his husband did. But it’s okay? He’s past his grief? Did I miss something? What are you trying to say?!

On the husband of it all, they let Oliver off way too easily. Unless I’m missing something about the way that rich/affluent people handle things, which is something I definitely want to talk about in this review, the husband deserved to get the heat of what happened and how he threw a grenade into their lives. Not with his death. But with his actions before his death. He broke the rules of his agreement with Marc and then told him in a letter before dying two seconds later. He’s a coward. Furthermore, he’s also a liar because he went and spent all that money on an apartment in Paris without telling Marc. And I understand that Marc, Sophie, and Thomas loved him. That doesn’t mean what he did gets to have his bad actions waved away. He hurt people. And the people he hurt have the absolute right to air those grievances. Instead, we saw Sophie self-involved to the point where she ended up drunk at a bus stop while she’s not lamenting at the sexiness of the apartment, Thomas commenting on how it’s never him, and Marc just being sad in Paris.

And before anybody goes, “People grieve differently,” I know. But if you’re going to sell me a movie called Good Grief, the least you could do is explore that grief in any shape, way, or form. You could at least let the characters feel that grief and loss or have a conversation about it. Instead, these characters were giving “I’m grieving but let me show you how big my house is, the fancy art shows that I go to, my beautiful Paris apartment, and how I have the money to buy this “hobo chic” clothes while still looking effortless.” And we’ve seen movies before where rich/affluent people grieve. That’s not my problem. My problem is that if where they are going, what they wear, what houses they have, and their blase lifestyle receives more emphasis in this movie than the actual grief, then you’re not telling the story you think you are. You’re not telling a story about grief. You’re telling a story about status.

By the end of Good Grief, I got from this movie the same feeling that I got when Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development was talking to her son about how much bananas cost. She thought a single banana cost $10. And all of that was meant as a joke to show you how disconnected from the general population she is. That’s what I felt with Good Grief. I felt like there was a disconnect from how actual human beings deal with grief in any singular way. Like sometimes grief is quiet. Grief sneaks up on you. But this movie didn’t even show me that with its actions. Instead, I got a group of friends that were on the brink of bubbling up and spilling over, and then someone turned the heat down with no explanation.

Then there are Marc’s friends. The more that I think about Thomas the more I realize that I know who he is because he told me instead of showing me. I know he was worried about Sophie because he told me. I know that he moved in with Marc and was lamenting him not being chosen because he told me. But I never got that from his actions. You’re supposed to show me and not tell me everything when it comes to a character or their motivations. And Thomas as a character really feels like Levy did not trust viewers to understand the character or he had no clear or concise understanding himself of how he was going to tie this man’s story to his character’s journey through grief.

I feel the same way for Sophie. She spent the entirety of the movie being a caricature of what a socialite is. She was flighty, exuberant, grandiose in her view of life, and never willing to settle down. And besides one moment where we saw her in genuine pain when she was lugging her luggage to meet up with Marc and Thomas, she didn’t move past that. For a moment there I understood that she was afraid of commitment but I didn’t understand why. And then when she decided to finally take a risk and get her man back, I still didn’t understand why. If anything, it seemed like after all this pushing away of the man, she decided to change for the man and not for herself.

Ultimately, Good Grief is the epitome of disconnected celebrity trying to make an art house film about grief for a general audience without trusting the general audience and talking at them instead of trying to connect with them. And like I said at the beginning of this review, I wanted it to like this. Part of it was because I wanted to celebrate someone like Dan Levy breaking into the stagnant and straight of it all in Hollywood. But another part of it was because I believe that queer people also deserve to see their loves and losses explored on the big and little screen. Movies like this legitimize our experiences and show the world that we are here and that we’re not anywhere. Unfortunately, Good Grief is a lackluster attempt at analyzing grief that never actually landed on the point it was trying to make.

Good Grief is now available on Netflix.

What did you think of Good Grief? Let us know in the comments below!

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Queerly Not Straight posts Saturdays with opinion pieces, listicals, reviews, and more focused on the LGBT community (and occasionally about the Latine community since I am Latine.)